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London art trail sculpture gallery - What's in your DNA?

For our London Art trail, which ran from 29 June – 6 September 2015, we asked internationally renowned artists to design a beautiful double helix sculpture inspired by the question: What's in your DNA? Take a look at their sculptures and find out more about the artists' inspirations.

Artist gallery

The Journey

Guy Portelli

Style: My sculptures are narrated, colourful and include symbols. I explore the relationship with art and music, packaging and flight.

Inspiration: My design is based on two symbols, the swallow who shares my journey from Africa to England, and the hand print. The hand print as a symbol of creation and the swallow reflects the traveller.

Style: Thierry Noir painted five miles of the Berlin Wall illegally in the 1980s with his iconic and bold style.

Inspiration: For this sculpture, Noir wanted to pay tribute to the memory of his former assistant, Lisa Brown, who was affected by breast cancer and who passed away in July 2001, at the young age of 31 years old.

Style: Inspired by sixties art, Orla’s iconic stem print works across a myriad of products, creating a colourful world filled with optimism.

Inspiration: I find inspiration in many things, but especially love nature with the abundance of colourful flowers, leaves and stems. Applying our multi stem onto the DNA spiral seemed a natural choice as it represents positivity and growth: qualities that are so relevant for cancer research.

Style: Stylistically the piece is an abstraction of the hand painted pottery techniques that developed in Delft in the 17th century.

Inspiration: The recurrent motifs of Delft tiles reference those of DNA. Our inspiration was the combination of our family’s DNA, drawing on Dutch and Canadian origins, and the fact that twins have shared genomes.

Style: Aston Martin's DNA and artistic style can be summed up in three words: 'power', 'beauty' and 'soul'.

Inspiration: Like the double helix, each Aston Martin comprises a vast number of individual elements that work in harmony. This sculpture has been trimmed in fine leather inviting people to touch its surfaces and experience the crafted soul of an Aston Martin.

Inspiration: The Mayoral Helix is inspired by the Mayoral ceremonial dress – the red, white and black background reflects the ceremonial robe, with the distinctive gold chains of office and the ceremonial mace spiralling around the sculpture’s helical form.

Style: Ted Baker approaches fashion unconventionally. Renowned for their quintessential British sensibility, customers trust that Ted will deliver something a little out of the ordinary.

Inspiration: Always a fan of spinning a yarn, Ted Baker’s Helix of Haberdashery sculpture unravels the tale of his evolution from shirt specialist to global lifestyle brand. Ted’s DNA is represented as a cascading double helix of pearlescent buttons, finished with a typically playful story-telling flourish.

Style: This sculpture captures the spirit and patina of a racing car after the race.

Inspiration: The human body starts life shiny and new. As you live your life, the faculties deteriorate but you carry on with what you have. A racing car is the same. This sculpture represents an F1 car after the race. ​

Style: I aspire to produce work that has both beauty and brains, in whatever medium is appropriate.

Inspiration: Through countless iterations, redundancies and successes, the emergence of our genes from the primordial soup is one of experimentation and chance. This design explores the theme of ambiguity and disguise in gender and sexuality, via the sexual differentiation of our species, expressed in the chromosomal “XY Sex determination system".

Style: Leyla works with mixed media, ink and paper to create her work.

Inspiration: My piece draws inspiration from southern Spain where the bright colours of an orange tree caught my eye. For me, the vibrancy of the tree and its colourful fruit symbolises life and hope. An ancient tree that springs back to life with vitality every year.

Style: British born, Benjamin Shine is an award-winning artist and designer who challenges perceptions through original constructional ideas and craftsmanship.

Inspiration: Ascension pays homage to Francis Crick’s early description of the Helix structure as a ‘twisted ladder’, whilst also symbolising the continued ascension to higher understanding within this area of science.

Style: Kindra Crick gives visual expression to the wonder and process of scientific inquiry and discovery in her layered mixed-media objects.

Inspiration: What Mad Pursuit explores the creative possibilities achievable through the intermingling of art, science and imagination in the quest for knowledge. The piece is inspired by my family’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA.

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